


Patterns

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Law & Order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-31
Updated: 2005-10-31
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:11:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliva Benson awakes to a phone call from a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patterns

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Caitrin Torres

 

 

"Patterns"  
Pairing: Olivia Benson/Alex Cabot  
Spoilers: up to and including the episode "Charisma." Minor reference to _Law and Order_ and the departure of Elisabeth Rohm's character.

_Just a plate of current fashion,/  
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes./  
Not a softness anywhere about me,/  
Only whalebone and brocade./  
And I sink on a seat in the shade/  
Of a lime tree. For my passion/  
Wars against the stiff brocade. _

Sometimes the effect that trauma had on the mind was hell; other times, it was a fucking lifeline. Still shaking from the adrenaline that had coursed through her body when whatever woke her registered in her mind, Olivia honestly wasn't sure which this was. She took a deep breath and tried to figure out whether this time she ought to try to remember what woke her up. With the week she'd been having, she thought as she let her head drop into her hands, it was probably better to let the fleeting memories slip back into the unconscious. It wasn't like they weren't likely to sneak up on her when she was least expecting it. Yeah, forgetting was definitely the better route, she told herself as she felt her heart rate slow toward normal. Whatever it was she'd been dreaming about, it was horrible enough that her brain had decided to censor it, and these days she figured her brain was probably a hell of a lot smarter than she was.

A moment later, the phone ringing answered part of the question. It also jarred her memory. It hadn't just been the dream that woke her up. The phone had rung before. Still half asleep, she forgot what that might mean. She reached over to the nightstand and picked up the handset. The caller ID screen told her that it was a private name and number, but she was just annoyed enough at having been woken up that she hit the talk button.

"What?"

There was a pause before the words came, but it wasn't words she heard. It was the voice that reached deep inside her and brought her fully awake. A certain pitch, a hint of an accent, tinges of inflection she just about forgot between the calls.

"You doing all right?"

Oh. The phone had rung twice before. That meant only one terrible, wonderful thing. "Al--"

"I know it's been a rough week, but surely you remember that we agreed that--"

Olivia shook her head, hoping that would make the persistent image of a certain blonde ADA who was supposed to be dead go away. "Sorry, I was asleep."

"Then you're doing better than I thought you would be."

"I wouldn't go that far since I'm not really sure you could actually call it sleep, but thank you. I think you woke me from something worse than what I saw this past week." She rubbed her hand across her eyes, dry as they were, and rolled her legs over the side of the bed. If she was going to have this conversation, she was going to need a drink. Even in a week when she hadn't had to face down a cult leader and the army of children he'd fathered in order to turn them into sex slaves, hearing from Alex, the allegedly deceased, tended to leave her mouth dry. And that reaction had nothing to do with shock or fear. It had everything to do with nerves. It had been hard enough staying calm around Alex before she'd had her in her arms for that one horrible fleeting night. At least that night, the blood had been an anti-aphrodisiac. Now, she could only remember the warmth of Alex's body and how shocked she'd felt that Alex, the lawyer who sat behind a desk, had such a strong base of lean muscle on her willowy frame. In retrospect, Olivia guessed that it took a lot more muscle to stand up to the perps in court and the actual DA than maybe she'd ever realized. Turned out, that kind of fortitude was going to come in handy for Alex, though she couldn't have known that then. Alex's voice brought her, thankfully, back to the present. She reached for the water glass on the nightstand, took a sip, and felt the still cool water slide down her throat. Hadn't even been asleep long enough for it to reach room temperature.

"The web. Newspapers. When you've got this much time on your hands, you find ways. Let's hope you never have to find out how."

Olivia thought about that for a minute, and the idea of responding that she'd gladly welcome that kind of leisure time and anonymity was on her lips before she realized it would be a lie. Alex deserved the truth, so she said the only thing she could. "You have a point."

There was a beat before Alex's voice found itself again. "Don't think it escaped my notice that you didn't answer my question."

"I'm terrible, but I'm coping. El--some people, on the other hand--they sent him home."

There was a low whistle. It seemed such a base thing from someone who had oozed class and privilege from every pore. It was an incongruity, but then, the lack of that incongruity would have been a necessary adaptation. Olivia doubted there was a way to put someone in witness protection and have them stay as uppercrust as Alex Cabot, New York City ADA had been. Even a slight sneer at a bottle of wine worth less than thirty dollars could have given Alex away, wherever she was now. Witness protection tended to land people in places very unlike where they had been before, and Alex would surely be stuck in strip mall hell somewhere in the great flyover where the people who drank wine usually drank it from a box.

Two kinds of folks went to work as ADAs. Bleeding heart liberals who felt guilty taking too much money as corporate lawyers. Some of them burned out and sold out, or were drowned by the crushing loans that made law school possible. Others turned bitter for not getting paid like the criminals to do the right work. Then there were the trust fund kids, who had been to the best prep schools, the most exclusive high Ivies--even Brown was beneath them. From there, they had an invitation that would inevitably be filled out by the most competitive law schools. They could afford to do the right thing because their lifestyle was paid for before they even set foot in kindergarten. Alex was the latter, a fact Olivia had sensed from the first time the then ADA's very expensive designer shoes had echoed on the precinct's floor. Alex had that thing that came with money. That aura that made common things like dirt stay away.

On her less charitable days, Olivia wanted to ask Alex on one of these mystery calls if witness protection had given her a life that conformed to her usual standard of living. How someone who'd probably thought nothing of dropping $200 on a dinner was faring in some middle American town where nobody could tell arugula from raddichio.

The utter everydayness of it all must rankle something awful. How Alex's life had become a pattern as dull as a plane forced to circle over JFK. "Yeah, well. He needed to go."

"Sounds worse than usual. Worse than I heard."

Olivia laughed. "I started to say that you had no idea, but the irony of this situation is that you're one of a very elite club of people who do know just how bad it can be."

There was a delicate snort. "For all the good it does me from here."

There was acid in Alex's words and tone, a bitter regret that she was trapped where she couldn't do any good, Olivia guessed. It made her recall a thousand fleeting moments. Olivia pressed her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose. It was way too late at night to be wrestling with these demons. With Alex, it had always been the whole package that she was attracted to. The iron tenacity with which she pursued justice. The way a perp getting off on a technicality seemed to stick in her craw even as she realized that the system had to follow rules. The first time she'd realized what she was feeling it was the way that Alex seemed so goddamned self-assured and satisfied when a perp in interrogation had broken while they both watched through the observation glass. Common goals, Olivia had imagined as she locked eyes with her ADA, apparently turned them both on.

Unfortunately, once Olivia realized it, the images haunted her everywhere. Watching the way Alex's calf muscles flexed as she'd get to her feet after long hours in an uncomfortable desk chair pouring over files in some non descript office. Wondering what it would be like to run her hand up past that calf, onto the thigh. Wondering just how cut Alex's quad muscle would be, and whether it would tremble beneath the gentle touch of Olivia's hand. Whether that quiver would be anxiety or arousal or both. Anticipation. Olivia had had years to think about what it would be like to see Alex wear that kind of anticipation. The recurring fantasy of pushing Alex's thighs apart as Olivia sought the heat between those legs--imagined fantasies of expensive lace underwear from small boutiques, the fine fabric soggy with lust. The contrast of her own hands, rougher than they should be, pushing the moss or aubergine fabric aside, and--

There had never been anything coarse about the fantasies Olivia had had about Alex, at least not until in those dreams she'd finally been able to get her hands onto, or into, Alex. And then--well, no matter what degrees hung on your wall, or what kind of family you came from, everyone in bed ended up a the same level of desperation. At least, people did if they were doing it right. At that point, the thread count really didn't matter. Sheets got dirty the same way the world over. What she'd wanted was to see that pale neck arched and that blonde hair flung recklessly back, those manicured hands gripping sheets looking for a hold to tether her to something real, while Olivia buried herself between those long legs.

She wanted to know how that voice would sound in bed. Whether it would go all deep and husky or rise in pitch as excitement made the muscles in her throat tighten. Olivia tried to clear her head, but even then, if she thought about it, she could almost see the crease in Alex's brow, the way just the corners of her tight lips would turn down at the corners, and the thought of the image of Alex's lips made Olivia push that thought away. She was in dangerous territory here.

On her less charitable nights, she couldn't let the fantasy play, too aware of the gulf between the two of them, but tonight was not a less charitable night. Tonight was a night that had driven home--again--how wide a chasm separated her and Alex from people whose nightmares stayed nightmares. The two of them on this tenuous phone line were people whose jobs daily exposed them to stories that made any nightmare seem like a kiddie ride. Tonight, she was almost too grateful that Alex had thought of her, and tonight was almost the kind of night she was too likely to forget the rules and allow that desire for understanding to bleed into the two syllables of former ADA Cabot's first name. She longed to be just a person talking to another person. She'd almost slipped.

Almost. In her line of work, one moment of stepping over the line from almost into done could get people killed. No matter her own pain, she had to remember how precipitous Alex's position was, even if she was a woman who could melt Olivia's reserve just by coming back from the dead.

"That bad?"

"Worse. But--" And then, mid sentence, she stopped. She had been about to say that they had gotten the bad guy, but the truth was that a 12 year old who had been raped and brainwashed by the bad guy had made the decision to shoot the bastard. She, Olivia, hadn't done anything to get the bad guy at all. It didn't seem fair to the kid that she took the credit for ridding the world of something like that--something that passed for a man even though he was willing to leave all humanity behind for his own twisted ends.

"It's not your fault." There was a long pregnant pause at the end of that sentence--one so still that Olivia felt as if Alex had been struggling to avoid breaking her own rule. As if her name had been so close to Alex's lips that Olivia heard its echoes in her own mind.

Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

As if maybe Alex needed that connection as desperately as Olivia did. Instead she shook her head, trying to push away the fantasy of hearing Alex breathily utter her name. Olivia could think of about a thousand positions from which she'd like to hear Alex try that, but none of them could be accomplished over a phone.

"You don't know that. You can't know the whole story." She wanted to let herself fall into this--let herself believe those tempting little lies even if deep down she knew letting herself believe sweet little lies had a nasty way of coming back to bite her in the end.

Some nights, she just wanted to be able to forget that. Alex's voice tended to make that desire worse.

"I don't need to know the full story. I know you."

If only. If only they'd had the chance. To know each other. Out of the office. Olivia thought back to a look or two Alex had given her that night--before the bullet and the blood and the street. She felt that familiar little flutter in her stomach, and she pushed it away. Too easy, too tempting, too safe to imagine that was true. "A--I appreciate you saying so, but trust me on this one." She paused and drew a deep breath, closing her eyes against images she knew would haunt her until her dying day, that denial a pattern she fell into all too easily and yet not easily at all.

"If you had tried to take him out in the doorway, those kids would have been just as dead." And weirdly, it was the fact that Alex could be so blunt, could talk about the gory details without getting off on them that made it so tempting to fall.

"Not all of them." A pause, in which she imagined Alex scowling at her. "Well, okay, _maybe_ not all of them, but a maybe has to be better than a not at all, right?"

"Please don't ask me that where I am right now." Olivia thought about that. These conversations were such minefields. "No, I'm sorry. That's not fair. The answer is not always. I've got a couple of _maybes_ that haunt me far worse than the refusals. Really."

"But if I'd waited for El--him, maybe--"

"Maybe nothing. I know he's your partner, but having him there would not have made it better."

"Don't--" Olivia stopped. There was nothing safe she could have said to that.

"Sorry. I wish there was something I could do." She heard resignation in Alex's voice, as if she know that the words were empty but had nothing else to give. At least, not from wherever she was.

"You called. You're listening. And you get it. You've been there. That means something. A lot, actually." She waited, wondered if it was the right thing to do, and finally reminded herself that Alex had called. That meant she could take it. After all, that was the problem. The allure. Alex had proved she wouldn't cut and run in the middle of a bad month because it got to be too much. It clearly took more to scare her off than many cops could stomach. It wasn't just detectives the SVU burned through pretty fast. They also tended to burn through ADAs. So she said it. Out loud. For the first time. "The kid had to shoot the bad guy."

"I know."

"Maybe I should have--" Should have what? There was no other option. Olivia knew that. Somewhere deep down.

"You did the right thing. You did the right thing in an awful situation where there was no good answer." There was a pause. "Trust me on this, I know a little something about bad situations with no good answers. Situations that make every decision awful. Situations where every single direction you turn, someone gets hurt. Sometimes an awful lot of someones."

"That's--"

"And sometimes one someone who makes all the rest seem unimportant. I'm sorry, O--. So very sorry."

Olivia thought back to how very, very angry she had been about that night. Alex had died in her arms. On the list of things that haunted her was the way that she could still feel the warm blood seeping onto her arms, and then days later how bitter she was as she realized the whole thing had been faked. She remembered laughing at her own coping mechanisms when she remembered that at some point within minutes of arriving at that SUV, seconds after the door opened to show her an Alex who was alive and burdened with volumes left unsaid in her eyes, before her brain even had a chance to process it all, Olivia had begun to wonder about how the fake blood got to be body temperature.

It took a while for the rest of it to sink in. Mostly she remembered the way her soul had been ripped to shreds. The whole station had mourned. Munch and Finn had even tiptoed around her. If they saw more than a detective mourning a coworker, they said nothing about it, and once she even suspected that she had walked in on Finn threatening to kick the ass of a uniform who had suggested that it was maybe something more. She wasn't sure whether to be grateful that her colleagues understood and had her back or pissed off that she hadn't had the guts to honor Alex's memory by finally being totally honest.

That indecision had made seeing Alex with the sling on her arm, seated almost daintily in the back of the hulking black SUV even worse. That much relief and hope should never be allowed to mix with that much anger and betrayal. It was just too much all at once, and she wasn't at all sure even now that she knew how to process it all. Her brain shorted out when she thought about it. The fact that she and Alex lacked the ability to talk things through hadn't helped either. There had been the promise of something when Alex was going to go into protection at her place, and then Alex had died, except she hadn't. Witness protection, and Alex wasn't supposed to have contact with her old life. All in under a week. There--there ought to be some kind of statute of limitations on how much shit you had to deal with in a week, right?

No such luck, and Olivia had made tentative peace with it as best she could. It had been almost exactly six months later when the first phone call came. At home. No caller ID. The connection hadn't lasted long enough for anyone to trace had they been trying to. They had said almost nothing to each other. But the fact that Alex had made the effort to call spoke volumes.

Somehow with the amount of mortal danger they both faced on a regular basis, it had simply been enough to listen to each other breathe. Sometimes after too many drinks, Olivia wondered if it was like a little shot of air to sustain Alex as she suffocated from the utter mundanity of whatever she must be doing in her false life.

It also meant, though, that Olivia had spent the week following each call tormented by images she had mostly managed to repress. And just when her life had settled down into something that passed for normality, another call would come. Just moving from one pattern to the next, this game they played. And yet, she couldn't break out.

On her less charitable days, Olivia wondered if Alex enjoyed tormenting her. On her more optimistic ones, she liked to think that maybe it meant she didn't want to be forgotten, passed over for someone more immediate. As if that was possible.

There was no predicting when she would call. Olivia figured it all depended on when Alex was able to slip away to a line that wouldn't betray her. This had been the first time the call had lasted as long as it had and come right after something especially bad, even for the SVU, had happened. They both knew that each call was borrowed time, but clearly Alex knew Olivia well enough to know that she needed her to risk it.

"So, any updates on your return?" Olivia heard rustling that suggested Alex was shaking her head on the other end of the line.

"No, nothing yet."

"You bored to death yet?"

There was a laugh--bitter and ironic and profoundly sad. "You have no idea."

There was nothing good to say to that. "Well, when you do, I want the whole story. How you manage to get away and--"

"I go through all this to call, and that's what you ask about. Of course. I forgot for a moment that you're a--well, what you do for a living."

"Would you rather I ask the question neither of us ever asked?"

Silence flowed across the circuits, and then Alex's voice came back, more quiet, less teasing. "No. I--I don't think I could bear it."

"A--" She started and stopped again. There was nothing to be said to that. "I know."

"Do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Know how hard it is. No one there knew. At least, they couldn't prove. What happened to Serena. I never had any intention of letting it happen to me. I never thought I'd need to until--until that night, and I could tell--I could tell the way you looked at me--held me--that woke up feelings I thought were dead."

"Serena?"

"Hasn't made the gossip there yet, has it? Turns out, that a certain boss made it clear he didn't want any queers in his office. Used some excuse about her being soft on the death penalty or crime in general to force Serena out."

"I try not to pay attention to gossip. Too often it turns out to be true."

"Well, watch your back. So far, it's only been on that side of the street, but--"

"I didn't know, you know. About you. Didn't even suspect. Hoped maybe, but--"

"I'm glad. I worked very hard to keep it that way. It was--it was the hardest part of this. But I--it was a little easier knowing that it would help keep you safe."

"Safe?"

"Safer than you'd otherwise be. At least about--this."

Olivia couldn't help it. A bitter parody of a laugh erupted from her throat. It was all she could do not to follow it into a descent into madness. Safe? No one was safe around her. "That's so sick it's almost funny, you know."

"Hey, stop that. You can handle this. You handled him. You'll handle what comes next. What I'm handling--no one should have to handle."

Olivia wasn't entirely sure that the same couldn't be said of every case they caught."

"Both of us in our own way are made for action. Sitting, waiting, treading water--I think it's more deadly than bullets."

"At least, then some of them."

"Would you ever have said?"

"No. I--I prefer to show than say. I'm--not very good with words in some ways."

Olivia laughed. "You have met my coworkers, right? You know I can translate. Do you need me to translate?"

She waited, but heard nothing. A moment later, she heard another kind of nothing. Fucking hell. Fuck the scum that put them there. The scum like criminals who killed off witnesses and the scum who beat up queers. And most of all the scum who pretended to be civilized who worked in back rooms to pass on their own fucked up religious or psychological bullshit to the rest of the world. It was a special kind of hell to hear Alex say those things now, but it was another not to be able to diffuse the tension with a joke about using the whole witness protection ruse to avoid commitment just because right fucking then the line went dead. It was usually like that when Alex called, and it never felt good, but this time it was worse than ever. The clock now read 11:42. Olivia hauled herself out of bed and headed for the bathroom. She didn't want to go back to sleep. Didn't want to risk the dreams that would come. She wasn't sure what would have been worse--seeing the pacifier next to the toddler in the pool of blood or having to imagine the warm, lithe body--alive, definitely and completely alive this time--of a certain blonde former ADA in her arms, under her hands, under her lips and tongue, and--and she really had to stop. Either one was dangerous, though in very different ways.

She pushed herself up to her feet and padded softly across the floor away from the bed. The paperwork she'd put off this week was far less awful. A quick shower, a bagel and a cup of coffee on the way there, and the familiar hum of the office. That would distract her for now, but she honestly didn't think it was going to work for long. Maybe just long enough to get through one more day. If that was all she was going to get, she'd take it.

Olivia gave the phone one last look as it sat, seemingly innocent on the nightstand. She was awake now--more awake than she'd been since the last time the phone talked to her that way. Maybe if she was lucky she could put some parts of herself back to sleep.

She was halfway to the shower when she realized it was still dark out. It was nearly midnight. And there might be people at work, but she'd gone home only hours before, so going in wasn't really an option, especially not when Elliot had been sent home for his mental state. The office couldn't offer refuge, and the television would only tell stories that made things worse. Running wouldn't make anything better--too many dark corners in parks that felt like there might be a black SUV there.

Olivia got up and walked to the window. It was a first floor view of a row of brownstones. No sparkling city lights stretched out beneath an uptown view from an upper floor for her, but someone who'd had one had bothered to call her, in the depths of their nights. And that counted for something. Two rings and then silence. Two rings and then silence, and then another, and then a fragile exchange of words that couldn't ever be enough but was always better than nothing, and it was a pattern she longed for with a desperate thirst even though there wasn't enough water in the world to quench it. Two rings and then silence, and then another ring, and then a long drink of water always cut short, and then silence again. Olivia could wait through the silence because she knew the rules, recognized the pattern. All of it.

She went to her closet and stared at what clean clothes were left there. She fingered a grey suit that she liked. The one she wore to court on the really bad days. Her armor against everything. She'd put it on tomorrow, along with the holster and her badge. She'd walk back into the precinct as if nothing had happened. She'd do what she had to do. The long blue line. A steel grey suit. A pattern she understood. She turned off the light and slipped back into bed. She'd fall back into step with the pattern she understood. Chase the bad guys. Close yourself off. Keep them at arm's length. Until another night some time from now, the phone would ring in that predictable way. Christ, what a fucked up world, Olivia thought as she fought to get back to sleep.

_Gorgeously arrayed,/  
Boned and stayed./  
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace/  
By each button, hook, and lace./  
For the man who should loose me is dead,/  
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,/  
In a pattern called a war./  
Christ! What are patterns for?_

Title and lines of poetry from "Patterns" by Amy Lowell.

 


End file.
